Would it be a stretch to call GPT "glorified Markov Chains"? (I used tweaked M.C. once to make a music composer bot. I actually got a few decent tunes out of it, kind of a Bach style.)
Simply explained: How does GPT work?
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Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
> that there are no demons underneath Given that Lacan already proposed the unconscious as structured language-like more than half a century ago and described attention in his turn on Freud's impulse in favor of his concept of derive , we may say, this is pretty much where our own demons live. (I actually do think that revisiting Lacan in this context may be productive.)
We need to form some sort of guild of engineers who think Deleuze, Latour, Lacan et caterva should be read within our disciplines.
I second this. The STEM (= engineering) / humanities divide in software may miss some.
(There had been times, when linguistics were still a major entry path into computing, where things were a bit different. Notably, this were also the times, which gave rise to most of the general paradigms. A certain amount of generality was even regarded a prerequisite to programming. Particularly, HN is such a great place, because it holds up this notion of generality.)
Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?
#123> It is able to link ideas logically, defend them, adapt to the context, roleplay, and (especially the latest GPT-4) avoid contradicting itself. Isn't this just responding to the context provided? Like if I say "Write a Limerick about cats eating rats" isn't it just generating words that will come after that context, and correctly guessing that they'll rhyme in a certain way? It's really cool that it can generate coh…
It's all about emergent complexity. While you can reduce it to "just"
statistical auto-completion of the next word, we are seeing evidence of abstraction and reasoning produced as a higher-order effect of these simple completions.
It's a bit like the Sagan quote: "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe".
Sometimes for GPT to "just" complete the next word in a way that humans find plausible, it must, along the way, develop a model of the world, theory of mind, abstract reasoning, etc. Because the models are opaque, we can't yet point to a certain batch of CPU cycles and say "there! it just engaged in abstract reasoning". But we can see from the output that to some extent it's happening, somehow.
We also see effects like this when looking at collective intelligence of bees and ants. While each individual insect is only performing simple actions with extremely limited cognitive processing, it can add up to highly complex and intelligent/adaptive mechanics at the level of the swarm. There are many phenomena like this in nature.
Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I hate being the bearish guy during the hype cycle, but I think a lot of that is just anthropomorphizing it. They fed it TBs of human text, it spits out human text, we think it's humanesque. Of course maybe I'm wrong and it's AGI and it will find this comment and torture me for for insulting it's intelligence.
> I hate being the bearish guy No, please keep it up. Someone needs to keep pushing back against all the "I don't understand it, but it says smart-sounding things, and I don't understand the human brain either, so they're probably the same, it must be sentient!" It's a pretty handy technology, to be sure. But it's still just a tool.
>"I don't understand it, but it says smart-sounding things, and I don't understand the human brain either, so they're probably the same, it must be sentient!"
This perfectly summarize so much of the discourse around GPT.
Except people lack the humility to say they don't understand the brain, so instead they type "It works just like your brain," or "Food for thought: can you prove it isn't just like your brain?"
Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?
#125I've been using GPT4 to code and these explanations are somewhat unsatisfactory. I have seen it seemingly come up with novel solutions in a way that I can't describe in any other way than it is thinking. It's really difficult for me to imagine how such a seemingly simple predictive algorithm could lead to such complex solutions. I'm not sure even the people building these models really grasp it either.
What is the time-spent for delta btwn fixing GPT code to writing it all yourself? Is it a reasonable scaffold that will grow over time?
Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?
#126I've been using GPT4 to code and these explanations are somewhat unsatisfactory. I have seen it seemingly come up with novel solutions in a way that I can't describe in any other way than it is thinking. It's really difficult for me to imagine how such a seemingly simple predictive algorithm could lead to such complex solutions. I'm not sure even the people building these models really grasp it either.
The advanced capabilities of scaled up transformer models fed oodles of training data has burdened me with pseudo-philosophical questions about the nature of cognition that I am not well equipped to articulate, and make me wish I'd studied more neuroscience, philosophy, and comp sci earlier in life. A possibly off-topic thought dump: - What is thinking, exactly? - Does human (or superhuman) thinking require conscious…
My views:
The best definition of "intelligence" is "the degree of ability to correctly predict future outcomes based on past experience".
Our cortex (part of the brain used for cognition/thinking) appears to be literally a prediction engine where predicted outcomes (what's going to happen next) are compared to sensory reality and updated on that basis (i.e. we learn by surprise - when we are wrong). This makes sense as an evolutionary pressure since ability to predict location of food sources, behavior of predators, etc, etc, is obviously a huge advantage over being directly reactive to sensory input in the way that simpler animals (e.g. insects) are.
I'd define consciousness as the subjective experience of having a cognitive architecture that has particular feedback paths/connections. The fact that there is an architectural basis to consciousness would seem to be proved by impairments such as "blindsight" where one is able to see, but not conscious of that ability! (eg. ability to navigate a cluttered corridoor, while subjectively blind).
It doesn't seem that consciousness is a requirement for intelligence ("ability to think"), although that predictive capability can presumably benefit from more information, so these feedback paths may well have evolutionary benefit.
The reason a "string predictor on steroids" turns out to be able to do things that seem like thinking is because prediction is the essence of thinking/intelligence! Of course there's a lot internally missing from GPT-4 compared to our brain, for example basics like working memory (any internal state that persists from one output word to the next) and looping/iteration, but feeding it's own output back in does provide somewhat of a substitute for working memory, and external scripting/looping (AutoGPT, etc) goes a long way too.
Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?
#127Does anyone have a good recommendation for a book that would cover the underlying ideas behind LLMs? Google ends up giving me a lot of ads, and ChatGPT is vague about specifics as per usual.
Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is absolutely not viable because exponential growth absolutely kills the concept. Such a system would already struggle with multiple-word inputs and it would be completely impossible to make it scale to even a paragraph of text, even if you had ALL of the observable universe at your disposal for encoding the entries. Consider: If you just have simple sentences consisting of 3 words (subject, object, verb, with 1…
α: most of those sentences are meaningless so they won't come up in normal use β: if statements can grab patterns just fine in most languages, they're not limited to pure equality γ: it's a thought experiment about how easy it can be to create illusions without real depth, and specifically not about making an AGI that stands up to scrutiny
> most of those sentences are meaningless so they won't come up in normal use
Feel free to come up with a better entropy model then. Stackoverflow gives me confidence that it will be between 5 and 11 bits per word anyway [https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/8480/what-is...].
> if statements can grab patterns just fine in most languages, they're not limited to pure equality
This does not help you one bit. If you want to produce 9 sentences of output per query then regular expressions, pattern matching or even general intelligence inside your if statements will NOT be able to save the concept.
Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?
#129It is still funny to me that so much emergent behavior comes from some simple token sampling task
Your token gets me thinking... Edward DeBono (Six Thinking Hats) has been a thing in business circles for creative thinking for years, and one could very easily make the argument that the process it describes is just as you state - take a token, now process the token through a series of steps that morph that token in predefined ways in order to generate a novel outcome.
Maybe this ChatGPT stuff is "smarter" than I've been giving it credit.
Re: Simply explained: How does GPT work?
#130I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who takes the Chinese Room scenario seriously, or at least can see how it applies to any of this.
I cannot see that it matters if a computer understands something. If it quacks like a duck and walks like a duck, and your only need is for it to quack and walk like a duck, then it doesn’t matter if it’s actually a duck or not for all intents and purposes.
It only matters if you probe beyond the realm at which you previously decided it matters (e.g roasting and eating it), at which point you are also insisting that it walk, quack and TASTE like a duck. So then you quantify that, change the goalposts, and assess every prospective duck against that.
And if one comes along that matches all of those but doesn’t have wings, then if you deny it to be a duck FOR ALL INTENTS AND PURPOSES it simply means you didn’t specify your requirements.
I’m no philosopher, but if your argument hinges on moving goalposts until purity is reached, and your basic assumption is that the requirements for purity are infinite, then it’s not a very useful argument.
It seems to me to posit that to understand requires that the understandee is human. If that’s the case we just pick another word for it and move on with our lives.